Deer Lease Question

[Hoosierhunting]

Letmgrow: yeah, I get it. I’m a landowner too and enjoy the tractor time as much as anything these days. I don’t know the specifics of your part of the country but there’s no way you could’ve spent nearly as much on a lease here and had nothing left but a memory. At $10/acre that’s about the cost of property taxes. You won’t touch rec land here for less than $5,000/acre. Public land is limited and very crowded. I want to lease property so I have more places/room to hunt so I can hunt till my hearts content without burning out my place.


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[Hoosierhunting]

40 acres rice lease with five man pit and guaranteed water - $7,500. Ducks not guaranteed.

376 acres in 3 fields mostly rice some timber, outside Corning - $32,000. Ducks still not guaranteed. First split was pretty damn good though.


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[OkieKubota]

Letmgrow: yeah, I get it. I’m a landowner too and enjoy the tractor time as much as anything these days. I don’t know the specifics of your part of the country but there’s no way you could’ve spent nearly as much on a lease here and had nothing left but a memory. At $10/acre that’s about the cost of property taxes. You won’t touch rec land here for less than $5,000/acre. Public land is limited and very crowded. I want to lease property so I have more places/room to hunt so I can hunt till my hearts content without burning out my place.


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My problem with leasing is unless I have pics of some deer on the lease that gets my heart pounding I am not interested in shooting anything. This year I didn’t have anything down there to hunt...it was pretty sad...

 

[Letmgrow]

Letmgrow: yeah, I get it. I’m a landowner too and enjoy the tractor time as much as anything these days. I don’t know the specifics of your part of the country but there’s no way you could’ve spent nearly as much on a lease here and had nothing left but a memory. At $10/acre that’s about the cost of property taxes. You won’t touch rec land here for less than $5,000/acre. Public land is limited and very crowded. I want to lease property so I have more places/room to hunt so I can hunt till my hearts content without burning out my place.


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At $10 per acre it would take a while. It has gotten tougher around here to lease hunting land. The larger farmers have bought up the smaller farms and have put them into production. Some farmers might allow hunting but many of the farmers have family members who hunt also. Liability for anything in NY State is rough. If someone tripped on a stone here the landowner would be named in a lawsuit.
We have quite a large amount of State land up here. But with a city nearby, a few villages and the ARMY Base just a few miles away State land gets crowded fast.
I honestly don't know any farmer around the area who leases out rights to hunt on their property.
If Chainsaw reads this he might enlighten me a bit. Where he lives he is surrounded by large farms who actually lease land elsewhere for farming. One of those is the farmer who leases my land for growing crops. Probably a 30 mile trip for him and his equipment.
This whole area where I live was covered by farms back when I was growing up. When the ARMY base started to expand the farms got gobbled up by out of the area developers and now we have Shopping Malls and stores sitting on rich farm land.

 

[Chainsaw]

Lynn

At $10 per acre it would take a while. It has gotten tougher around here to lease hunting land. The larger farmers have bought up the smaller farms and have put them into production. Some farmers might allow hunting but many of the farmers have family members who hunt also. Liability for anything in NY State is rough. If someone tripped on a stone here the landowner would be named in a lawsuit.
We have quite a large amount of State land up here. But with a city nearby, a few villages and the ARMY Base just a few miles away State land gets crowded fast.
I honestly don't know any farmer around the area who leases out rights to hunt on their property.
If Chainsaw reads this he might enlighten me a bit. Where he lives he is surrounded by large farms who actually lease land elsewhere for farming. One of those is the farmer who leases my land for growing crops. Probably a 30 mile trip for him and his equipment.
This whole area where I live was covered by farms back when I was growing up. When the ARMY base started to expand the farms got gobbled up by out of the area developers and now we have Shopping Malls and stores sitting on rich farm land.

Lynn, I have not heard of any land that could be leased in this area. Seemingly everybody hunts so they do not lease their land. Some farmer owners don't hunt but their workers or relatives do so leasing is not being done. Some farmers though do give permission to hunt to many local people. There is lots of public land down this way to hunt but it is tough land. For example a 3800 acre area bordering Lake Ontario normally has only a car or two at each of say four normal access points. That sounds pretty roomy but most of the 3800 acres are cat tails and water; that is pretty tough hunting in there, certainly not impossible but not my cup of tea. Driving deer is still popular in this area on state lands and some farm properties as well so nocturnal movement is normal during rifle season. Bow season can be pretty good on the public lands though as there really are not a lot of bow hunters for the amount of open land. For me being from away it was either buy my own land or hunt the cat tails and water areas.
At the then going rate of $100 per acre purchase price (1987 to 1990 something) buying was a no-brainer.

 

[MarkDarvin]

Very interesting. Seems like wildlife have economic value in the south. Not so much up here.

 

[Hoosierhunting]

Very interesting. Seems like wildlife have economic value in the south. Not so much up here.

Mark, it’s supply and demand as a function of population density/hunting interest and parcel size. In NoDak I’d assume the population density means your situation is very different from many of us. People are surprised by leasing in Texas thinking that it’s a big state so access would be easy, but what I learned from living there was that you have a huge number of hunters and generally large parcel size. On a 4000 acre ranch one no keeps you shut out of that property, in Indiana you might have 40 landowners to ask for the same 4000 acres. Thus guys band together and lease a larger parcel. 20 years ago access for waterfowling was a cakewalk here in Indiana because there weren’t a lot of duck hunters left. I call it the Duck Dynasty effect, but now we’re brimming with waterfowlers and it’s the same story as deer hunting.....crowded public areas and harder access on private lands. It’s great to see the traditions going strong but I will admit at times it can be a bit frustrating.


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[Drycreek]

You can ask for permission all you want to here, but I’d wager you would get 90% no, 9% hell no, and 1% blank looks. Not quite that bad, but close. It’s just not done unless you’re already friends or relatives. Been that way for awhile.

That said, I’ve gotten permission quite a bit to hunt coyotes. Nobody loves Ole Wiley !

 

[Turkish]

Very interesting. Seems like wildlife have economic value in the south. Not so much up here.

Absolutely they do. With timber market depressed, recreational value still has land values doing well. My club (lease with 2 others, primitive campsite, 380 acres solid hardwood timber, thinned every 8 years or so) leases for around $15/ac with insurance. Price goes up a dollar or so a year. I could buy it for $3100 ac. It has somewhere around $1500/ac standing timber value, maybe more. It’s been managed to a point that each thinning, I expect they’re harvesting $500-800/ac of logs. This may give you an idea of the economics of hunting land in MS. Many leases in the area are up around $30/ac. Our hunting is honestly pretty crappy. Taxes in that county of timberland are around $6-8/ac I think.

We also own land, unfortunately about an hour away from the lease. We enjoy being able to cut trees if we want and plant larger food plots there. Land there sells for a little less but leases for about the same, despite much lower taxes.